Not My Mother

This was our second really busy weekend in a row. I don’t think I had my computer on at all over either of them, that’s how busy I was. Too busy to check blogs, it really doesn’t get any busier than that.

The reason we’ve been so busy is that my baby shower was on Sunday, and we wanted to get the baby’s room finished beforehand. So we worked hard sorting that out, and then we did a whole bunch of other little jobs we’d been procrastinating on like unpacking all the books in the family room (or rather, putting the piles of unpacked books on the shelves); putting up shelves in the study and sorting out all the papers etc which had exploded in there. Seriously, it was our dumping ground and it was disgusting. I would have taken a before photo to show you, but I couldn’t find the camera. That’s how bad it was.

Anyway, it all got done and now the house looks awesome. It’s amazing how much nicer a place looks when it’s tidy and all the half-unpacked boxes are removed. And I’m amazed at how much we can achieve if we stop procrastinating and just do stuff. Dave’s moaning about not having had a proper weekend for ages but I don’t care, the house is lovely and he can play computer games every night this week if he wants.

So the baby shower was wonderful. Dave’s sisters G and C did a great job. I was so touched when they offered to organise it, and also that everybody came. There were about 20 of us altogether and I was a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. I’m not all that comfortable being the centre of attention, I never feel I deserve it so I get all shy. But I looked around the room and it was filled with my friends, women that I love, who were all excited for me. And I got teary. And the baby got some wonderful gifts and I feel so loved and blessed by everyone.

Oh and get this – three of the people at the party were my mum and two of my aunts. My mum came. Given that our last big fight started (she’s not one to stay on topic in a fight) because she didn’t want to come down to visit after the baby was born and because I was a horrible person for saying I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable bringing a newborn on a four-hour round trip to visit her so she might have to wait a month or so before that happened, I really didn’t expect her to come. I mean, she barely made it to my wedding for fuck’s sake, why would she show for a couple of hours of afternoon tea? So when we were organising this six or eight weeks ago I told her she’d be getting an invite because it would look odd if she didn’t but not to worry about it. And there she was, they came down on the train and she’d arranged with Cath to be collected at our local station.

I do not understand her.

Oh, and there was absolutely no mention of our argument. She just phoned a week or so ago, out of the blue, and asked me what I still needed for the baby, so she could tell my aunts what to get me. And that some of them were coming down, and they were all put out because they hadn’t gotten invites to the shower, but she’d “smoothed it over” (my mother has no internal editor; everything you tell her will be repeated to everyone she knows without thinking about whether it’s appropriate or not, so beware). I told her honestly that since none of them came to our wedding and that had been far more important to me I hadn’t even thought of inviting them to this (it’s not like the baby’s here yet) and she said that they still liked to have the opportunity to say no. And I didn’t know what to say to that.

Sometimes I think I’m a changeling.

It’s no secret that my life, it is disorganised. I work full time and there never seems to be enough time left over to keep up with everything i need to do. My evenings and weekends are filled with chores, my house is filled with stuff, we don’t eat well and there are piles of dust and paperwork in every room. By the end of the week, the house is a disaster; I’m doing well if I can just keep up with the laundry and there’s only two of us! Okay yes, we are lazy, and we often prefer to spend an evening snuggled together on the couch watching a movie than doing the filing but still, that can’t make us that different to other people, can it? Sometimes I look around and I think, surely not everyone lives this way. Where did all the time go, that other people fill with hobbies and fun? 

And it’s only going to get worse once the baby comes and I go back to work at the end of the year. I’ll only be going back part time but from what I’ve heard kidlets are time sinks and I’m under no illusions that those extra couple of days off each week will result in any extra free time. That’s why I decided that I have to spend this year getting my home life in order, simplifying everything and getting routines in place so that when I do go back to work the wheels don’t fall off. 

The only problem is, I’m not really sure how to do that. So I was really excited to have the chance to read an advance copy of Simplify, a new ebook by Joshua Becker of Becoming Minimalist. Simplify is subtitled 7 guiding principles to help anyone declutter their home and life and details the principles he and his family learned while making their transition to rational minimalism, and he delivers exactly that. 

Rational Minimalism. I’m loving that term. As I’ve started reading more minimalism blogs I’m struck by stories of people who want to cut down to less than 100 possessions, and I find that lifestyle as unappealing as that of people adopting ultrafrugality. Rational minimalism isn’t about that. It’s about getting rid of the things that really aren’t important to you so you have time and space for the things that are. Whether they are physical belongings or time to spend on people and activities you love, the prinicples are the same. 

We are very blessed, here in Australia, with the ability to take extended maternity leave. We have the right to take up to a year without risk of losing our position, and some (most? many? mine anyway) employers may extend that to 2 years if you request it. They even – shock! – let the father take paternity leave for the same period, although the rule usually is you can’t both be off at the same time. None of that enjoying time off as a family business, thank you very much.

So I’ve been spending the last couple of months deciphering the policies of both of our employers, trying to work out what we can do. It’s not helped that neither of our jobs has a visible HR presence anymore. There’s got to be someone, outside of the outsourced helplines*, but neither of our “people leaders” (bosses) could give us any names. So we do our best to follow the procedures, and convince our bosses that we’re doing what we need. All fun.

So anyway, this is what I’ve discovered for our situation:

• we don’t qualify for the Baby Bonus, or any governmental child assistance. No surprise there, Comrade Rudd’s policies are well known.
• both employers say we can have up to 52 weeks parental leave. Dave’s says we can overlap and be off at the same time, but mine does not (apart from a week after the birth) so no overlapping it is.
• when I go back to work, I have the option to request “parental part time” work; that is, to switch to part time for one or more periods up to when the baby is school aged. It means I have extra flexibility but don’t have to permanently switch to part time. But, my employer does not have to approve it and I do not necessarily get to stay the same grade as I am now, whereas if I return as full time, my grade and position must stay the same.
• I get 12 weeks paid leave, which I can take as 24 weeks at half pay. This is better for tax, so I’ll be doing it that way. (This is not standard across all companies in Australia, but I know many do it.)
• even better, Dave can also take 12 weeks fully paid parental leave, as long as I have gone back to work and he is the primary carer. (This is absolutely not standard, so they must be applauded for getting at least one thing right in a sea of wrong.) All he needs is a letter from my employer saying I will be returning to work when he is on leave.

I want Dave to be able to take the time to be with the baby if he can, so many men don’t get that chance and anyway, it’s free paid holiday (as far as he thinks, anyway), so why not? Good lord, if they offer it, take what you can. So it seemed pretty simple to say I’d take the first 40 weeks (with 24 paid at half pay and 16 unpaid), and then return in December as parental part time, while Dave did the final 12 weeks.

But we hit a snag: in Dave’s policy there’s no definition of what “primary carer” means. Is it enough for me to have returned to work part time, or must I be full time? What if I’d returned for 3 days/week, proportionally that makes Dave the primary carer. Finally Dave tracked down an HR person (in Australia) who said, no, it meant full time. Dave pointed out it didn’t SAY that and she said it didn’t matter, that’s how she would interpret it and that’s what counted. Which… okay. This is what they do at his work. You’d think it’d be easier to write a watertight policy, but no.

The problem with this is it’s not clear if my work will let me come back full time and then switch to part time after 3 months. In which case, bugger. We need a new plan. Luckily, our policies are a bit better written and say I can request it at any time. I just may not get it. That was also when I discovered I wouldn’t necessarily get to be the same grade or position. Okay, that’s a whole new layer of things to worry about.

Finally I wrote my boss a rambly email about this, and the next day when he was in he sat down and sketched out a timeline of what I’d like to do. And he said he’d never had to deal with parental leave stuff in his short time as a team leader but if the policy said he could do it, he had no problem with it and he’d be able to plan around it as long as he knew it was coming.

I guess I’m really lucky that I have a boss who’s got kids and a wife who worked part time. And that he’s not a stickler for policy and things are pretty relaxed around here right now. And hopefully that I’m seen as a reasonably good resource.

So right now, all we’re waiting for is for him to write a letter saying that he is my line manager and that I’m coming back to work full time on 6th December, so Dave can request his parental leave for the end of the year. Then once I’m back we start the process to switch to parental part time.

On the one hand, I’m a little disappointed about coming back full time rather than part time. I’m worried that all my carefully crafted routines will go out the window when Dave’s in charge of the little one. Which is silly because, these routines? They don’t even exist yet. Who’s to say I’ll get them done anyway when there’s so many infomercials to watch every day?

On the other hand, it will be nice to effectively get a little extra cash injection from us both being on full-time pay for those 12 weeks. It will make up for any shortfall we’ll have while I’m not working. And, who knows? Maybe Dave will love not-working so much it will help get him more on board with my frugality push!

Who knew it would be so difficult to sort all this out? I know I should be grateful that my work is so flexible, and I am really. But at the same time I feel like I’m trying to line up two pieces of snaky hose without holding either of them still, and I could really do with someone saying to me definitively, “Yes, that works. We agree we’ll do it that way.” Because even though there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t agree, I’m still a little bit nervous about it.

* (Yes, both our employers have outsourced most HR functions overseas. And no, I don’t blame the workers there for not being able to interpret the finer points of the policy for us. It’s tempting, but that’s not what they’ve been employed to do. When companies do this, they do it to move the grunt work, the data entry, the fixing of easy problems, and the workers have specific procedures and targets judged by metrics and are absolutely NOT encouraged to think creatively. They don’t know the business enough or get paid enough to make the calls. (Neither, for that matter, did the grunts who did the same job here before it was outsourced.) It was done in an area which I have to work with regularly and I don’t deny it has its frustrations for everyone involved but please let’s not get sidetracked into debating offshoring jobs. The invisible HR people we both needed to talk to are still in Australia.)

I’ve just discovered that since I turned off comments moderation, wordpress has stopped telling me when I have comments. I’m sorry! I don’t mean to ignore anyone and I’m really grateful for you taking the time to comment.

I’m sick of my theme and need to find a new one. (That tiny writing! Argh!) I think the ability to reply to comments definitely needs to be on the list of features.

As you were :-)

That can’t be right, can it?

I’ve been trying to work out what’s changed and really our use of water is no different. (It will be, soon, when I go on maternity leave. Eek!) But, this house is about 20 years old while the last one was only about 6 and built with different standards and with newer, more efficient appliances. I think a lot of it can come down to that:

• the toilets in the last house were water efficient, while these ones… aren’t. They do at least have a half-flush option, but it seriously uses more water than the previous toilets’ full flush.
• evaporative cooling: 18 months ago we installed a system in the last house which only used 10 litres of water per session and didn’t dump it until an hour after you turned it off, in case you changed your mind. Old systems are much less efficient and also dump the water regularly while running. I’m not sure how old the system is in this house, but it’s not new, and it’s been a hot summer.
• we have an automatic watering system that comes on at midnight for 15 minutes, twice a week. This is new to us and might need to go.

Other than that, we’re using the washing machine, dishwasher and showers the same as we used to. So can all of this really add up to an extra 200 litres usage per day? It’s hard to believe. So I guess that also leaves leaks in the system, and errors in the bill. We have just been given a new water meter, maybe something went wrong there. It’s all stuff to investigate.

We do have the option of making changes like installing newer toilets and hooking the automatic sprinklers to the water tank. There are companies around that can come and do an assessment of your home and suggest ways you can improve the energy efficiency, for example by changing insulation or windows, or installing solar hot water systems or panels. A friend recently had this done and it’s something I’ve been meaning to do. The Australian government also has a Green Loans program where you can borrow up to $10,000 interest free over four years to help fund the changes. We should qualify for that, assuming it doesn’t run out of money soon.

Ah, the joys of owning a slightly older home. On top of this I want to get an electrician in to do an inspection and a few odd jobs, as it turns out we don’t have a trip switch on the fuse box and the spa may not be connected properly. Plus we’ve got some vines heading into the roof space, with possibly some damage there. These are all just little nagging maintenance issues that are annoying and I don’t know how much they’ll cost to sort out, which is a bit stressful right about now.

I suppose this is where some people would start the argument for renting instead of owning, but I wouldn’t want to go back to renting. Right now we’re in a home that we love, where we can change anything we want and are not at the mercy of shonky landlords. No one cares if we put up a shelf or paint a room or let the garden go. We can fix our wireless internet problems (the house is very long, and the wireless range doesn’t cover the whole of it) by wiring everything up instead. All of this adds up to a lot of freedom. Besides, I like nesting and making a home, and I like the idea of being able to change things we don’t like and improve them. We can see ourselves being happy in this house for 10 years or more, so the idea that we can make it just the home we want is pretty exciting. Is it the absolute best frugal financial decision? Probably not, but it makes us happy and it matters to us. We can be extra frugal in other areas instead.

Anyway, if we were renting this house we’d still have to pay the water bill, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it :-) I guess I’ve just got another fun home project on my list now. You know, in all my upcoming spare time.

I’ve been thinking about it though, and I’ve decided to pause the “emergency fund” at $15k for now. This is mostly a mental thing. Bytta at 151 Days Off recently wrote about whether you should have a cash reserve or an emergency fund. She says labelling it an “emergency fund” would “plant in your mind how 1001 disastrous events could unfold in your life, hence unwittingly or subconsciously attracting them”. Instead she suggests calling it a “cash reserve” as it has business connotations of a fund to cover expenses beyond the usual expenses, and is also open to being used for new opportunities.

I’ve been thinking about it and I think she’s right. Also, I have a mental block about using the emergency fund – it has to be a real emergency before I’d want to tap into it, and I’d hate to see that number go down. The thing is we’ve got a lot of unknown expenses possibly coming up this year, some of which include:

• we don’t really know how much the baby’s birth will cost. We’ll be out of pocket at least $800 for the hospital stay (that’s our excess/deductible), and it’s possible there’ll be some further bills related to the obstetrician that are not yet budgetted for.
• we need to switch cars soon, selling Dave’s beloved RX-8 and getting a used Volkswagon Passat wagon instead. From the prices on carsales.com.au we think we can pretty much do a direct switch but I’m prepared for a couple of thousand dollars extra needed there.
• I get maternity leave paid at 50% of my salary for 24 weeks and we can live quite comfortably in that, but that leaves at least 16 weeks where I’ll not be bringing in an income. (We’re hoping Dave can take paid parental leave for the last 12 weeks.) We need some cash reserves to cover that time.

See, none of those are emergencies, so I would have a really hard time paying for them out of the emergency fund, plus how not-fun will it be to see the numbers going down! So instead, our excess funds are now divided into 3 branches:

I could actually pay it directly off our mortgages and redraw it later if needed, but there are some Australian taxation issues which make this less than ideal, so instead it stays in our bank account which has a 100% offset against the mortgage. (This is quite interesting for Aussies, so I’ll talk more about this another day.)

I’ve been doing this since we settled on the mortgages at the end of October, and there’s about $2,600 in this fund already.

This is where the “unassigned” portion of our salary now goes, ie what’s left over at the end of the pay cycle when we’ve budgetted for everything and any unexpected expenditures have been paid. Currently we’ve got a healthy $1500 per fortnight unassigned but at the end of this month it’ll go down to more like $400 when my pay is halved for maternity leave.I’ve only just started this bucket since the emergency fund is complete so it’s not got anything in it yet. Actually, it’s at -$400 because we withdrew $1000 to open an investment account (which is something else Bytta talked about and again, I’ll say more about soon). This is maybe what other people call their emergency fund, and where all those unexpected expenses I listed above will come from. Hopefully we’ll have enough to cover our needs and the time when I’m not earning, plus we’re due a fairly good tax refund when we get around to filing, but if not then I have the option of cashing out some long service leave which will cover us fine.

(To be honest, the only reason this is separate from the extra mortgage repayments is that I like to see where each bit of money is coming from separately. It feels tidy, but they’re all there to be used if necessary.)

So that’s it. My cash buffer: Real Emergency Fund, Extra Mortgage Repayments, and then our Cash Reserves. I’m feeling really good about this, it’s only a few months since we bought our latest house on the spur of the moment and I had quite a bit of anxiety about how we’d manage with the baby, and yet so far it’s working out fine and I’m feeling comfortable about the rest of the year.

That doesn’t mean I’m letting Dave buy any more gadgets though!

We went home to visit my mother on the weekend. It did not go well. The same arguments, the same utter conviction that I am completely wrong. I can cope with us having different viewpoints on topics, even when the topic is our relationship. It’s inevitable, we’re coming from opposite sides, of course we see it differently. But I would like to discuss it, find out why she thinks one way and explain why I think another, and she won’t. I am just wrong. More, I am just bad, and everything that is wrong is down to me.

(And then the screaming starts.)

I spent years believing her. I still do, really. I think I’m bad and worthless and I can’t imagine why Dave wants to be with me. He’s a smart guy, right? Why is he still here? I must be fooling him somehow. Then he says, I’ve lived with you for the past five years and she barely knows you, who do you think is right? And I almost believe him. Almost.

It was so much easier when we lived overseas.

I’m feeling pretty sad right now. But I’ll be okay in a bit.